Jordan Jantoc is surrounded by cousins and a sister at home, a few weeks after he accidentally shot and killed his stepbrother on Sept. 21, 2006. From left: Merina Sanchez, 5, Leua Correa, 8, and Brittany Walker, 8. less

Jordan Jantoc is surrounded by cousins and a sister at home, a few weeks after he accidentally shot and killed his stepbrother on Sept. 21, 2006. From left: Merina Sanchez, 5, Leua Correa, 8, and Brittany ... more

Photo: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Under his mother's watch, Jordan calls his lawyer on July 5 to tell him he'll accept the plea agreement. Prosecutors promised to drop all weapons charges in return for a guilty plea.

Under his mother's watch, Jordan calls his lawyer on July 5 to tell him he'll accept the plea agreement. Prosecutors promised to drop all weapons charges in return for a guilty plea.

Photo: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Tim Miller, left, and Lena Jantoc, holding baby Gabriel Michael Miller, and Jordan's biological father, Lorenzo Jantoc, react with relief at the King County Courthouse after a judge announces on Oct. 3 that Jordan will be placed under house arrest and can leave the jail. less

Tim Miller, left, and Lena Jantoc, holding baby Gabriel Michael Miller, and Jordan's biological father, Lorenzo Jantoc, react with relief at the King County Courthouse after a judge announces on Oct. 3 that ... more

Photo: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Family members visit Michael's grave on Easter Sunday at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton.

Family members visit Michael's grave on Easter Sunday at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton.

Photo: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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One Fatal Shot: A struggle to forgive one son, not forget the other

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What Jordan remembers from the night he killed his stepbrother is Michael sitting on the floor in the basement bedroom they had shared since childhood, his back against the futon, reaching for the gun in Jordan's hand. Or maybe Mikey was just reaching forward to stand up -- Jordan isn't sure. He knows, though, that he was wearing football gloves, and that the gun went off.

"At first, I thought he was playing," said the boy, 16, who stood there for a moment, staring as his brother fell over on the bed. Then he ran.

There were a series of frantic phone calls -- first to his father, then to 911, though Jordan says he never got through to the medics. When police found him soon after, he was crouched, shirtless and shivering, by the side of a van down the block.

For Jordan Jantoc, the year after that night last September has been a series of jail cells, courtrooms and lawyers' offices, where adults deliberated over how to charge the lumbering, round-faced teenager for a death family members insist was accidental. Three judges have weighed in. School officials and caseworkers have tried to monitor the youth's every move.

On Friday, when he is finally sentenced, Jordan will face up to 8 1/2 years in state prison in a case that underscores the stunning ease with which children can get guns.

Yet the mechanics of King County's legal system look streamlined compared with daily life in Jordan's home.

Once a sprawling crew of a dozen children, teenagers and assorted adult relations who happily packed themselves into a used van for boisterous road trips, the family has disintegrated. It is now a strained constellation of isolated bodies tenuously held together by Timothy Miller -- father to Mikey and stepfather to Jordan -- who finds himself in the unusual position of being both a victim and defender of the accused, mourning the death of his athletic teenage son, while struggling to raise the boy who killed him.

'Protected each other'

Jordan was always the soft one, Miller says, the one who got teary at the mere threat of a reprimand, the one who preferred his theater group to the wrestling matches his brothers loved. They nicknamed him matagaga ("crybaby" in his mother's native Samoan), and though he was physically tough enough to dream of becoming a pro football player, Jordan, the adults agreed, had always been troublingly vulnerable to peer pressure.

There was the night two years ago when he got caught in a stolen car, joyriding with a friend. One of the crowd as usual, rarely the instigator.

"He's always kind of acted without thinking -- just naive -- and he's still like that," Miller said. "Immature."

The two boys met as children, ages 5 and 6, when Mikey's father was coaching martial arts, and Jordan's mother enrolled her sons. Both raising children on their own, Tim Miller and Lena Jantoc became friends first, then a couple, road-tripping around the country with their combined brood of nine -- a modern, interracial Brady Bunch.

In 2000, they moved into a roomy, ranch-style home on a working-class street in Boulevard Park, where the little kids could throw their bicycles on the front porch and no one much cared if the front yard was muddy.

The Miller-Jantoc clan went everywhere together -- to school, the movies and the mall -- seeming to find more joy within their newly enlarged family than through friends outside. Mikey and Jordan, both attention-hogging hams, became inseparable.

"They might fight like cats and dogs, but they always protected each other," said Stephen Beets, a police officer posted at the boys' Evergreen High School. "If you were going to fight one, you were going to fight both."

Their parents, despite a newly happy home life, were not oblivious to trouble that a gaggle of teenagers might get into. Police had lately been concerned about gang violence in the neighborhood and several times a year Beets confiscated automatic weapons from Evergreen students. So Miller and Jantoc lectured their children constantly about right and wrong, screening their friends, insisting that they attend church, ferrying them to and from social events.

"We were always so concerned about them out there," said Jordan's mother, her voice trailing off at the realization that despite all the vigilance, her stepson was killed at home on a school night, after football practice.

Anything but jail

Prosecutor Don Raz was not swayed by Jordan's apparent childishness, charging the teenager with first-degree manslaughter and ordering him held him in a jail cell with a dozen accused drug dealers and thieves.

Mark Larson, chief deputy in the King County prosecutor's office, said he understood the "tragic" familial aspect of the shooting but, "When you engage in reckless gunplay, causing somebody's death, that's a crime for which people should be held accountable."

Ten days after Mikey's death, his family made their first visit to see Jordan in the King County Jail, arriving as usual, en masse, like a team -- one boy strumming a ukulele and babysitting the children too young to go in. To Samoans, family is everything -- more important than protocol or efficiency or the legal system. Lena Jantoc, filling out the bright-pink visitor's form, was so nervous at the thought of her boy in jail that she forgot her own birth date. As Jordan walked toward her, behind a Plexiglas divider, she burst into tears.

"So how're you doing?" the boy's stepfather asked, sitting down heavily and reaching for the broken intercom receiver. He was wearing one of the Michael Miller memorial sweatshirts the family had made within hours of the boy's death, a color picture of the youth smiling across his chest, R.I.P. written above it.

"OK," said Jordan, looking slightly dazed in his prison jumpsuit.

Miller leaned toward the glass, speaking quietly. "Jordan," he said, "I want to remind you, I'm not mad. I'm not angry." Then he stood and abruptly walked away from the visiting booth. Only then did the teenager begin to cry.

From the start, Miller, 49, had insisted that he felt no rage toward his stepson. Tearfully defending the boy in court, he begged one judge after another to release Jordan to his family pending trial. They would supervise him themselves, Miller promised -- anything to keep the impressionable teen from jail.

When not petitioning the legal system, the bespectacled nurse spent every free minute scraping together money for his stepson's $25,000 bail while simultaneously trying to collect enough for Mikey's funeral. Two weekends in a row, the family set up a carwash and bake sale. Neighbors often dropped by, pushing a few crumpled dollars into the children's hands.

To Miller, it seemed the courts were making him a victim at least as much as his stepson had. "Jordan's going to have enough punishment knowing he's responsible for his brother's death -- his best friend's death," he said.

"Why should the state feel that they should punish him on top of that if I don't want to?" he said. "I'm the one that lost Mikey -- not Don Raz, not the judge or the jury. I lost him."

Stolen gun hidden at school

At one point, Tim Miller owned more than a dozen firearms, mostly used for target practice and stored, he says, in a locked room off-limits to the kids. An estimated 69,000 King County children live in homes with guns, according to a 2004 survey, and Miller was a particularly avid collector, often making his own bullets at home. Yet when police searched his house after the shooting, they found none -- other than the .380-caliber pistol that killed Miller's son.

It came from a classmate of Jordan's at Evergreen High. The boy had stolen it from his dad and given it to Jordan, with the promise of an additional $100, in trade for a Glock semiautomatic that Jordan had, in turn, lifted from his stepfather's study.

"This wasn't my fault," Miller insists. "I wasn't irresponsible in my handling of that gun -- at least, I don't feel I was. I did not place the gun where it was easily accessible. I didn't invite anybody to come looking through my things and find a hidden gun."

About the cache of missing weapons, however, he has little to say, suggesting only that they must have been stolen, possibly by a youth who once lived with the family.

As his children were growing, Miller repeatedly explained firearm risks to them and he said he followed the rules. The Glock that Jordan took, for instance, had been locked inside a case and hidden in his study.

But during the first month of the 2006-'07 school year, Jordan wanted new clothes -- some long T's, maybe, or a pair of shoes -- and he thought he would buy them with the $100, plus whatever he could get from selling his schoolmate's pistol. Any number of kids at Evergreen might want it.

"I kept it in my bag for about two weeks, wrapped up in a towel, in a zipper compartment at the bottom," Jordan said recently. "It was always at school with me. I wasn't going to pull it out or anything."

'I'm not angry'

Even in good times, maintaining the Miller-Jantoc household is no small matter. Just doing laundry for a family the size of a basketball team takes a full day and Jordan's mother was soon so paralyzed with grief that she often spent entire weeks in bed.

Within three months of the shooting, the attentive, nurturing woman Miller had loved was completely shut down. The couple remained together, yes, sitting arm-in-arm on the sofa, but with an aching loneliness between them. In December, Miller took Lena to Las Vegas for her 41st birthday, insisting that they needed to get away and reconnect. For a week, they sat facing each other over dinner buffets, barely speaking.

"I gave birth to Jordan and I feel so bad that my kid did this to Tim's son," said Lena recently, hiccuping between sobs. "If I had known anything was going to happen, I would have rather stayed away and not met him and caused this kind of pain."

Jordan, meanwhile, had come home.

An electronic bracelet locked to his ankle monitored his every move. But the teen had been kicked out of Evergreen -- administrators suggested that he might be the target of retribution for Mikey's death -- so Jordan enrolled at Tyee High School, where he knew no one except his older sister, Renee, who also transferred, to keep him company.

Miller might have won the first battle in delaying his stepson's entry into prison, but he took little pleasure in it. There would be no sports teams, church outings or trips to the movies. Other than classes, the courts said, Jordan was not permitted to set foot outside the family's home. Nor, added his stepfather, would he ever be allowed to descend the stairs and walk into the basement room where he had shot his brother.

During the daytime, the bereaved father worked desperately to stay busy -- attending all-weekend wrestling tournaments, filming from the bleachers events in which his son had once excelled. But Lena refused to accompany him. She couldn't stand Mikey's absence. Miller, in turn, couldn't tolerate the wailing at home. After weekends with his family, he returned to work, miserable.

"I'm not angry," he said frequently, always repeating the phrase. "I'm not angry."

In prison, at home

The survival rate for marriages after the death of a child is dismal, and when they weren't sobbing in each others' arms, Miller and Lena spent much of the past year arguing, mostly over how best to discipline the 16-year-old now confined to their home.

The coach at Tyee had encouraged Jordan's interest in football, suggesting that he might join the team, but Miller wouldn't hear of it. His stepson should have no chance to taste victory -- that would be a reward, he thought, and Jordan deserved none.

"But we're asking the judge to give him a chance at a normal life," Lena said, insisting that her child had already been penalized enough.

"That's where we differ," Miller answered tersely, as Jordan held his head in his hands. "What Jordan did was wrong and he's going to be punished for it. Why should he get to play? That may sound bitter, but I think it's realistic. It would be kind of weird to be allowed to go out and have fun while you're in jail -- because this is supposed to be jail."

Five months after the shooting, Jordan's parents were living in a prison of their own. The bedroom they shared had descended into a cave of memory, crowded with Mikey's photographs and athletic awards. His football jersey hung opposite Lena's side of the bed, framed with funereal flowers. His wrestling helmet sat on the bureau. Each night, Miller would remove the memorial T-shirt he has worn every day since his son's death and drape it over a jewelry cabinet next to his pillow so that Mikey's face stared at him as he lay in bed, weeping in the darkness. Each morning, he put it on again.

Later in the day, while his other children were playing in the yard, Miller would extend a hearty invitation to Jordan, urging the boy to take a deep breath of the fresh air outside -- then pointedly retract the offer. After weekend wrestling matches, he might exclaim at the quality of the competition and then realize aloud, "Oh, that's right -- you weren't there. You can't go."

"I get my digs in," he said as Lena winced.

Save for conversations with Jordan's pastor, Terry Mattson, none of the family has received formal counseling. Miller, who has wept every day for the past year, is particularly repelled by the concept.

But Mattson believes that against all odds, the Miller-Jantocs will make it.

"They are doing very well in an incredibly difficult context," he said, attributing much of their resilience to the Samoan tradition of dealing openly with grief and relying on extended relations in a way that Western families typically do not. Yet two of Jordan's older brothers have since left home without a word to their parents and in March, Lena flew to American Samoa for an extended stay to nurse her ailing father. Soon after, Miller quit his job.

Writing to Mikey

Despite his insistence that the responsibility for Mikey's death lay on Jordan's shoulders, with each passing month Miller's guilt grew worse. He rarely slept more than two hours a night, instead staying up and pouring out his grief on a computer keyboard, writing to his dead son.

"Mikey, I blame myself for your death. I know that there were so many things I could have done differently or earlier that would have prevented the chain of events that led to your death. I'm anguished by the thought of each thing I could have done, but didn't," he wrote last winter. "Time and memory will be my punishers."

What if he hadn't spent so much money the previous summer -- would Jordan have felt the need to sell a gun for new school clothes? What if he had been watching television with the boys the night of the shooting, as usual, instead of helping Lena care for a sickly child? Would his sons have had time to play with a gun?

There were no answers, he wrote. Miller was living off savings and learning to cry without showing tears. "I have to maintain the household," he said.

For Jordan, life at home became strangely quiet without his mother around. In the evenings, instead of long family nights watching movies on television, it was just his stepfather sitting at the computer, eating take-out food.

"Sometimes I want to go hang out with him -- me, him and Mikey used to go everywhere together," Jordan said. But he hung back, afraid.

"I don't want every time he sees me to think about Mikey. Sometimes, when I'm sitting in his room and we're watching TV, I'll catch a side glance and see him tearing up. I would have thought, Oh, he's going to hate me forever, but it's not even close to that. He always tells me, 'I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.' It's kind of awkward."

Alone in his room, Jordan tried to write to his brother in a notebook -- which he soon lost -- and then on a MySpace account, which he quickly deleted.

Nor was school going well. Jordan's grades were lackluster at best. He loitered in the hallways and ended up back in the county jail for more than a week after staying late to work out with the football team.

Fed up with the boy's performance, Miller at first exploded, then stopped speaking to him altogether. It lasted for days, until Lena telephoned from Samoa, begging her husband to ease up. Jordan had called her, sobbing.

"She doesn't think it's fair because he didn't mean it and it was an accident," Miller said. "But I'm Mikey's father -- not Jordan's."

In April, Miller followed Lena to Samoa, leaving his stepson to finish the school year under the watch of a rotating series of aunts and uncles.

"My feelings about Jordan haven't changed that much," Miller said before leaving. "I've just had some anger in the last little while. I've got to get that under control."

Ending the uncertainty

The leafy, tropical island should have been a break for Miller -- just as the Christmastime trip to Las Vegas was intended to be -- but nowhere could he escape. At night, he wrote to Mikey from a creaky old computer and during the day he and Lena drove every road -- their car was the only place they could find any privacy -- debating for hours over whether to allow their son to plead guilty to manslaughter.

Lena had been against this from the beginning. The shooting had been accidental, she insisted, certain that at trial a jury would understand this and acquit her son. But there were complicating factors. Jordan's stolen-car joyride of two years ago could add extra weight to his illegal possession of a gun, so when the prosecutor's office promised to drop all weapons charges in return for a guilty plea, Miller capitulated.

"You are very young," Judge Paris Kallas said to the 16-year-old standing before her in July. "Do you understand the seriousness of the decision you are making and the impact it will have on the rest of your life?"

"Yes," Jordan said, thinking about the jobs his felony conviction might prevent him from getting, the questions he would have to answer, again and again, for decades. But all he wanted was an end to the uncertainty. Friday's sentencing, whatever its outcome, will bring that. Prosecutors plan to recommend that he serve three years.

As Miller and Lena see it, the integrity of their increasingly frayed family life also hangs in the balance -- send Jordan to prison and they will add another loss to the miserable tally of the past year.

Meanwhile, a headstone for Mikey sits, uncarved, in the mason's studio. Twelve months after the shooting, Miller has only recently chosen a final epitaph. "The gem of our family has been stolen from us," it begins.